


Icing Sugar

by LunaCatriona



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Comedy, Crack, EVERYTHING GOES WRONG, If it can go wrong it probably will, they're idiots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 04:35:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13779834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaCatriona/pseuds/LunaCatriona
Summary: Circumstance and curiosity - and Nicola Murray - land DoSAC in a whole load of trouble. And icing sugar.





	Icing Sugar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tereshkova (EarthboundCosmonaut)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EarthboundCosmonaut/gifts).



> This is mostly Tereshkova's doing. We need to stop chatting random shit.

“Oh, yes,” Nicola Murray smiled in answer to a journalist’s question. “Yes, you can be sure we will be putting in extra hours tonight to make sure everything is in perfect working order before it launches tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll have no gremlins in the wires!”

The sun beat down on Malcolm Tucker’s face as he listened to Nicola Murray witter on about her Healthy Choices fucking car crash, including a fucking informative website nobody was _ever_ going to use. Who had been the fucking bright spark who let her take questions at the end of her fucking speech? And whose fucking idea was it to hold this _outside_ on the hottest day of the year so far? What he wouldn’t give for a fucking minus twenty cold snap right now.

And her fucking dress. Who the fuck told her she could wear that thing? When did fucking lilac dresses become part of the fucking dress code for public appearances? “Jesus Christ,” muttered Malcolm. “It’s like watching someone fucking knot their own noose.”

Next to him, Ollie laughed. “She looks like she’s about to melt.”

But she did finish her speech, and for once without major fuck-up. Despite the fact the thirty-degree heat and accompanying ultra-violet rays were burning his pale Scottish face like fucking pork crackling, Malcolm was glad he’d come to this. It was a massive opportunity for Nicola to put both her feet in her mouth, and every time he left her civil servants to dig her out, they only dug her fucking deeper and then helped her fucking cave herself in.

By the time Nicola finally got down off her podium, Malcolm had relented and taken his suit jacket off. He was not made for this weather. “How did I do?” Nicola asked with a smile.

“Nobody died,” Malcolm allowed. “C’mon, before _I_ fucking die of heatstroke.”

“It’s only a bit of sunshine,” quipped Nicola. “Unless you really are a vampire and you’re being cremated from the inside out right now.”

Malcolm glared at her but started to lead her back to the car before she got the chance to commit the fuck-up she had thus far managed to avoid. He strode along with Ollie until he realised Nicola had stopped talking. When he turned around, she was bent over a flowerbed, giving all the journalists and cameramen a perfect view of her arse. “What are you doing?” asked Ollie.

“Oh, just picking this up,” Nicola said, holding up a small canvas sack, tied in a drawstring, about the size of a loaf cake. “Makes the place look untidy.”

Malcolm shook his head and asked, “Who are you, the litter warden or the Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Citizenship?” Nicola raised an eyebrow at him but started to walk again. “Just chuck it when you get to a bin. There’s one down there, look,” he added, pointing to the litter bin at the bottom of the path.

As she picked up her pace, she answered her phone. “Hello, James. Thought I felt you crawl into bed at four this morning,” she said. She sounded tense. “How was Krakow? Ugh, Krakow, Prague, Budapest, we all know it’s just piss up no matter where you are!”

In the car on the way back to DoSAC, Malcolm found his patience tested as Nicola continued the call from her husband. He didn’t really want to listen to her fucking marital train wreck. “Oh, I don’t know, James,” Nicola said sardonically, “maybe just not spend the _entire_ weekend of her birthday fucking partying?” Ollie shifted uncomfortably next to Nicola but she didn’t seem to notice. “You know what, I don’t want to know what you were doing or why. I’m a Cabinet minister – I’m better off not knowing what you and your mates get up to on a fucking Budapest stag do! But don’t blame your kids for being pissed off when you miss their birthday to go and do whatever the fuck you were doing!”

Nicola ended the phone call abruptly and threw the phone into her large handbag.

“Fucking twat,” she grumbled viciously.

Malcolm decided not to say anything, for it would only wind her up, and he really didn’t need her to be fucking anxious. He preferred having his fucking sanity.

It was six o’clock when they stepped out of the car outside DoSAC, and the late hour had done very little to cool the air. It was still muggy, like fucking breathing water. The police were coming down the street with a sniffer dog – a frequent occurrence during the high season, when people were passing through Heathrow into the city with who the fuck knows what on them. To Malcolm’s surprise and amusement, the spaniel stopped at Nicola and barked. The police officers stopped them on the steps into the building. “Come on,” laughed Malcolm. “Nicola Murray? Seriously?! She probably doesn’t even know what drugs look like! Probably the left-over residue from her party animal husband your wee dog’s picking up on!”

Nicola glared at Malcolm, and he silently dared her to contradict him and be searched. The police officers, familiar as they were with Whitehall, DoSAC and the naïve innocence of Nicola Murray, let them into their building without incident. Nicola Murray, carrying drugs. He’d never heard anything more ridiculous in his whole fucking life.

Once inside, Nicola set about him. “My husband is _not_ a cokehead, Malcolm, and I could do without you making jokes like that to the fucking police!”

“Who said anything about coke?” Malcolm smirked. “You _know_ he had half the coke to come out of Colombia up his nose when he was in Krakow over the weekend.”

“Budapest.”

“Like you said, same shit, different city.”

“Fuck you, Malcolm,” snapped Nicola as she stalked to the stairs. He didn’t follow her up to her office; he had no desire for an argument with Nicola Murray about her bent, unreliable fucking halfwit of a husband.

Instead, he went back to Number Ten to see if it was still standing, or if the Prime Minister had managed to burn it down in his absence. He didn’t really know if he was relieved or disappointed to find the place and everyone in it safe and sound. Maybe his life would be easier if a fucking missile hit the place the next time he had to accompany the Dozy Dame of DoSAC to her public appearances. On his television he caught the report of her speech; in fairness to her, she hadn’t done that badly. She’d managed to say what she needed to say and appear human while doing it, even in the fucking technicolour dress.

“Mrs. Murray even stopped to do a spot of tidying in the leisure centre gardens as she departed,” commented the reporter, almost sarcastically, over a shot of Nicola Murray’s lilac arse pointed in the air as she bent over. Christ, she could be so undignified sometimes. Even if she did have a nice arse.

* * *

 

Nicola threw her handbag down onto her desk wearily. Fucking Malcolm. She didn’t need reminded that James had probably been up to no good while he was on the continent. Jesus, he had smelled like a fucking distillery when he had oozed into bed beside her. He had tried to wake her up by kissing her neck and squeezing her arse but at four in the morning, Nicola was more inclined to strangle him than shag him – it was better all round for her to pretend to be comatose.

“How did it go?” asked Terri, who poked her head around the door.

“Yeah, fine,” Nicola sighed. “They seemed to be receptive.”

“Good,” smiled Terri. “Do you want to come and watch it? ITV will be starting soon?”

“I thought you aim to be home by six, Terri,” Nicola grumbled.

“Oh, I’m making an exception tonight. Got to check everything over before it all goes live in the morning.” Terri, working? Miracles were real, then. “Can I get you anything?”

“Uh, yeah. A coffee would be great, if you could, Terri.”

“Of course.”

Nicola sat down with a sigh and dug her phone out from her handbag. It was only when her hand hit something rather scratchy that she remembered about that bag she had picked up out of the flowerbed – James had called her and distracted her from binning it, like Malcolm had ordered her to. She was taken aback by how solid it felt in her hands when she pressed her fingers into it.

Curiosity got the better of her, and she untied the drawstring on the canvas bag. She pulled out a block wrapped in dark plastic wrap, and snipped the corner of it open with a pair of scissors. Its contents were bright white. There was a knock at the door, and Ollie walked in. “Look, about Malcolm earlier-”

“He’s a fucking arsehole, I know,” muttered Nicola.

“I was going to say his poor Scotch body was struggling with the summer heat but-” Ollie stopped talking abruptly, so Nicola looked up. He was staring at the desk.

“I think some poor sod’s dropped their icing sugar,” shrugged Nicola.

But Ollie put his hands over his face and let out a rather terrified-sounding laugh. “Icing sugar?” he repeated. “You _really_ think that’s icing sugar?!”

“Well, yeah. What else could it be?”

“Are you serious?” he laughed incredulously. “Fucking hell, Nicola, I didn’t think you were _that_ naïve!”

“What?” Nicola asked impatiently.

“That’s not fucking _icing sugar_!” he exclaimed. Why was he so hyped up? “That’s about a million quid in cocaine!” He picked it up and went through to Glenn – Nicola was suddenly very glad it was half past six and just about everyone else had gone home. “This fucking dopey dinosaur reckons _this_ is bloody icing sugar!” he said to Glenn, placing the small bale down onto the desk.

Glenn smiled, even chuckled, until he realised it wasn’t a joke. “Jesus Christ, where did you get that?”

“Nicola picked it up out of a fucking flowerbed! Malcolm told her to bin it, but it looks like she forgot about that when her husband called to relay the delights of Prague!”

“Budapest!” Nicola corrected him impatiently. “It’s fine. We’ll just call the police.”

Ollie, unexpectedly, let out another panicky laugh. “Yeah, that’ll look brilliant won’t it? Think about it! The day your husband comes home from fucking Budapest after buying all the white powder he can get his hands on, you end up with a fucking brick of it?! Nobody’s gonna believe you’re daft enough to pick up random packages! I mean, we know you – it doesn’t surprise us at all – but nobody else will believe you’re that idiotic!”

Terri returned with a cup of coffee, and handed it to Nicola. Her eyes fell onto what Nicola was now reliably informed was a product of far greater monetary value than icing sugar. “Please tell me that’s not what I think it is.”

Nicola put the cup down onto Glenn’s desk, very careful not to spill it with the package so near. She could feel her stomach twisting as she realised that what sat on a desk in her government department was both very valuable and _very_ fucking illegal. “What do we do?” she asked. She ran back to her office and scrambled through her bag for her Rescue Remedy, though she didn’t think that was going to cut it with a fucking bale of cocaine sitting on a desk in the next room.

When she returned, she was met with the sight of her own arse on the television, from when she had picked up that very package that now frightened her half to death. “Oh, Christ,” Ollie groaned.

“What?” asked Terri.

“Whoever left that there will now fucking know where it is!” he replied. “They’ll have seen her pick it up. She even said she was staying late tonight! Fucking hell, Nicola!”

“What do we do?!” she shouted, aware that she sounded slightly insane, and that her mouth had gone dry. She looked down at her phone. “Call Malcolm?! Yes, we’ll call Malcolm. He’ll know-”

“NO!” the other three yelled in unison.

Nicola jumped back a little, startled by their reaction.

“Malcolm will go _apeshit_!” Ollie said.

It dawned on her now that this was what that sniffer dog had been alerting his officers to outside the building earlier. “No, calling Malcolm is _not_ the way to go here,” Terri chipped in unhelpfully. Nicola didn’t want to know what the plan wasn’t – she wanted to know what the plan was.

She pressed her hand to her stomach and massaged it to try and undo the knot. “Then what do we _do_?!” she asked shrilly. “There’s a fucking lump of fucking cocaine in my office and, bloody hell, I’ve never even _seen_ cocaine, never mind had a fucking quantity like _that_ anywhere fucking near me!”

“Calm down, Nicola,” Glenn said; Nicola was sure he had meant to sound soothing, but his voice only grated on her eardrums.

Ollie went back into Nicola’s office and returned with the woven canvas sack she had taken the cocaine out of. He sellotaped over the corner of the brick Nicola had cut open and put it back in its bag, tying the drawstring securely. “Terri, get Elvis round here,” he said. “We can go and put it back where you found it,” he added to Nicola.

“Won’t that look suspicious, going back to the leisure centre now?” Nicola fretted.

“Only if you make it look suspicious,” he retorted. He shared an almost amused, knowing look with Glenn.

“We’re fucked!” Nicola said, her hands on her head. “I can’t go to prison, Ollie! I’ve got four fucking kids – James isn’t going to be able to handle them if I’m in prison!”

Terri stepped forwards and reassured her, “Nobody is going to prison. Just go and put it back and it’ll all be fine.”

“Okay,” Nicola breathed. “Okay. We can do this. There, in and out, two minutes out of the car at the most. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. Just returning it to where we found it.” But in her head, Nicola could not shake the feeling she really was fucked. Cocaine. Fucking _cocaine_. Jesus fucking Christ.

Ollie turned to her and said, “Come on, then. Time for the drop of the century.”


End file.
